Not to splice hair, but Google isn't just "surviving", so the amount needed for DDG to survive is probably even smaller than that. They don't need to be as profitable as Google Search (which is much more profitable than the company as a whole) to do well.
Google is not only massively profitable, they’re also running a ton of loss leading services designed to feed more data into the machine, like Gmail, as well as a ton of other experimental ventures that DDG isn’t doing.
Google is also headquartered in some of the most expensive real estate in America, while DDG is in Pennsylvania. I’d bet that Google is paying a lot more in land cost per employee than DDG is.
I live near DDG HQ, it’s not even a whole building. It can’t be more than a handful of offices. DDG’s real estate expenses are essentially $0 compared to whatever Google is spending.
Not anymore. Ruth Porat has been Ruthlessly cutting all the "give back to mankind" projects, YouTube became profitable recently after TEN years of losses, and Google for work is now profitable which means Google drive and Google docs makes money, finally. when I worked on search for Google we had 700 people in a building that was probably 25000 square feet. It felt almost like a chicken farm. Not many people born in America worked there.
Indeed, the part that they illustrated with Pong does show that in environments where you lose packets or have to reconnect there should be a more noticeable advantage.
$5 seems unrealistically low. The Tesla keys supposably have higher security, I remember they changed the software to address some vulnerability. My fobs each serviced 4 years w.o. breaking over 4 years
I've just paid £500 ($650 USD) to replace a lost Land Rover key and only they can program them against the car. We needed two but I decided to stick to just the one(!)
It can be confusing to compare the mortality rate of cases in hospitals (which are be definition the worst cases) to the mortality rate of all infections (many of which never get to hospitals or get officially diagnosed). Gotta make sure we compare apples to apples.
I'd use the DDG iOS app if only the search field wasn't at the very top, out of reach in one-hand phone typing... It's terrible UX on anything but the smallest phones out there.
This is exactly what happened. Verizon probably didn't know that most of the traffic they were buying were because of adult content, and then they killed that. I wish they had sold it to Pornhub instead.
Verizon didn't buy Tumblr. Verizon bought Yahoo/Oath and ended up with Tumblr. It's a very different scenario.
It's important to remember that Tumblr never turned a profit; as far as I've been able to determine it never hit the break-even point. And the bottom line is that a giant service that's losing money is worse to own than a tiny service that's losing money. Verizon's attempt to kick out the NSFW parts wasn't simple-mindedness or prudishness, it was a calculated risk that a smaller but SFW Tumblr might be able to at least make enough money to pay for itself.
Having said that, it's also important to note that Tumblr still gets a lot of traffic; by most measures it's still in the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet, and gets more traffic than Wordpress.com -- Automattic's closest "competing" product -- does.
You're widely overstating the importance of TechCrunch within Oath if you believe that that is the root of the name.
While it's obviously well known within these circles, engadget is approximately equivalently sized (see Alexa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engadget vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechCrunch ), and even when the company was described internally by its components they were AOL, Yahoo and sometimes also VDMS (which had been transferred to AOL from Verizon pre-Yahoo acquisition).
The name is dumb, we all agreed. As clearly did Verizon, since the company has been renamed since. But it was dumb in the sense of the CEO had a dumb idea that didn't translate well to other markets and not "The CEO had an even dumber idea and marketed it as being a slightly less dumb idea"
I just remember seeing a bunch of press releases of how Yahoo would be folded into the group led by the former AOL CEO, and that that group also contained TechCrunch and HuffPo. It felt weird that just those two were often mentioned together with AOL, and the initials lining up...?
Do you have a source for that? I worked there at the time of this unholy merger, and that explanation for the name was never given.
From what I recall, Tim Armstrong claimed the name reflected Verizon's promise to do right by AOL and Yahoo, or some other such complete nonsense. Internally, everyone I knew thought it was on par with Tronc for worst rebrand ever.
No, I don't have a source, and it could of course be possible that someone got the idea for the name somewhere else, but the initials of the businesses matching the thing is just too much of a coincidence.
I was at Yahoo until just before the sale to Verizon, which happened because the first attempt at spinning off the Alibaba shares tax-free failed. In the first attempt, Yahoo created a new company called Aabaco, which super conveniently could reasonably apply for the stock ticker AABA. (Alibaba had BABA)
When the first attempt failed, they needed an ALTernative solution, so they sold the core business to Verizon, and promptly renamed the company from Yahoo to Altaba and changed their stock ticker from YHOO to AABA.
Meanwhile, the press were super confused about the name change and there were a bunch of articles with people speculating on the name change, wondering what the name meant, etc, etc, because noone apparently could imagine that the name change was exactly as lazy and uninspired and dumb as it was.
I am pretty sure the OATH name was thought up by the same fine minds, and that it was equally uninspired and dumb. If you and your colleagues inside Verizon smelled corporate bullshit, I think that just strengthens my case.
